Got in a few small bunch of merchandise for this month. One of which I had been keeping an eye out on and intending to obtain for quite awhile now.

Pictures can be enlarged by right-clicking “View Image”

While my imports of the Japanese individual BD volume releases for the 2nd season of “Working!!” (entitled “Working’!!”) have been long completed since last year, there was still the HMV Japan store exclusive artbox that I wanted to obtain since I like to have one to hold all volumes together if one exists for it. I imported all of the BD volumes from Animate when the series was being released originally to obtain their own store exclusive drama CD that would be given out if all 7 volumes were purchased from them. HMV Japan’s store exclusive bonus was tempting for me, but I wasn’t gonna import the whole series twice just to get both Animate’s store exclusive drama CD & HMV Japan’s artbox, so I decided to put the priority of obtaining the artbox on the backburner.

Now a year later, I’ve finally managed to get it after a seller on Yahoo Japan Auctions put it up for sale along with the two store exclusive posters from HMV Japan as well. It should also be noted that this artbox was only sent out to buyers a few months after the final volume was released and wasn’t automatically bundled with it. This meant international customers of HMV Japan wouldn’t receive it unless they used Tenso’s proxy service or got a contact in Japan to purchase all the volumes on their behalf since the store specifically stated their exclusive bonuses are only given out to their domestic customers, or more specifically on the cases where said bonuses are sent out months after the final volume is released anyway if they’re not automatically included with it.

So onto the artbox itself. The artwork isn’t very eye-catching, but most of the store exclusive artboxes that I’ve seen from HMV Japan have been pretty plain so I’m not really surprised or too fussed about it. Like I said earlier, I like to have an artbox to hold all the loose volumes together if one exists for said series, and in this case, HMV Japan was the only store that made one for the series while all the others had an exclusive drama CD or some small random goods for their release.

On one side we have Aoi Yamada dressed in a HMV Japan uniform.

And in the back we have the official logo title for the series

Poplar Taneshima is featured on the other side, also wearing the HMV Japan uniform.

The auction seller stated that there was some damage on the bottom of the box, which you can see in the photo below, where it has some colour fading and scuff marks. Probably due to being moved around a lot I guess. Not really fussed about this as the rest of the artbox is in pretty good condition.

You might also be wondering about those random colour stripes on the box as well. Those colours actually correspond to the 7 volumes released for the series where each one had a distinct colour for the 7 main characters in the series. It basically allows you to fill up the box with all the volumes in reverse order (and matching its colours) to create a rather colourful display at the front.

And here the two HMV Japan store exclusive posters using the same artworks of Aoi & Poplar in the store’s uniform.

I’m pretty happy that I’ve been able to finally obtain this artbox as it doesn’t really pop up that often on Yahoo Japan Auctions. Even when they were sent out to Japanese buyers after the final volume was released, I didn’t see them get listed all that much. Throughout 2012, I only saw it being up for auction about two or three times and it seems they’ve all been snapped up, so I guess I’m lucky I managed to get both the artbox and posters from the same seller this year.

Next item in this loot is the 6th exclusive Shirokuma Cafe Takadanobaba’s mug featuring Sloth. As stated in a few previous Shirokuma Cafe merchandise posts, these Takadanobaba mugs from the Shirokuma Cafe that is run from the Takadanobaba town in Japan are limited to only 300 made, and each of them will have a number on it. I got number 30.

The cafe has yet to announce a 7th exclusive mug as this one was released back in May and each previous month before that they had always announced a new one that would be sold. Not sure if they have yet to sell out this one with Sloth and are waiting for it to do so before they announce a new one or if they’ve stopped making these.

Anyway, the final item in this loot is the bonus campaign CD containing cast commentaries from the Shirokuma Cafe live event that was released exclusively on DVD only at Animate (Sasaomoride in Yomiuri Land event). This CD was only given out to buyers who had purchased all of Animate’s limited edition BDs for the Shirokuma Cafe anime series out at the time (volumes 1-11) AND also purchased the live event DVD at the time of its release.

I’ve already explained in another post on why I didn’t receive this CD when I purchased the live event DVD but long story short; I missed purchasing one volume of Animate’s LE BD volume for the anime series (which I got off YJA instead), so because of that I didn’t qualify on receiving this bonus CD. Oh well, still got it in the end even if I had to spend more money on obtaining it.

So that’s the end of this post! Kara no Kyoukai fans are in a for a treat soon as my next loot post will contain a massive amount of new merchandise for the movie series that was recently released (to coincide with the 3D release of the Fukan Fukei movie in Japanese cinemas). Stay tuned! 🙂